What If You Designed Your Meetings Like Workshops?

A lot of meetings go off the rails long before anyone walks into the room. The problem usually isn’t the agenda. It’s that we skip a basic design step: matching the type of interaction to the purpose and outcomes we actually need.

Instead of defaulting to “let’s meet,” what happens if you start treating meetings the way you treat workshops, as something deliberately designed?

Start with purpose and outcomes

Before you pick a format, get clear on why you’re meeting and what needs to be different by the end.

1. Purpose: Why are you meeting? Are you informing, exploring, deciding, aligning, or creating something together?

2. Desired outcomes: What has to be true by the end? A decision made, a list of options, a draft journey map, a prioritized backlog?

3. Attendees: Who is essential to the discussion? Who has authority, who has context, and who will live with the outcomes?

If you can’t answer these, you’re not ready to choose a format. In workshop terms, you’re trying to pick activities before you know the goals.

Choose the right session type

Once you know the purpose and outcomes, you can choose the structure that will best get you there. This is where applying workshop thinking really changes things.

• Formal presentation: When the primary goal is information sharing or giving people a shared baseline before they do anything with it.

• Structured or facilitated discussion: When you need shared understanding, perspectives surfaced, or alignment on an issue or decision.

• Working session with tasks and activities: When you need people to co-create artifacts, analyze options, or move work forward together.

• Workshop: When you need a more complex mix of activities (diverge/converge, sensemaking, prioritization, planning) and you’re designing a full experience, not just a conversation.

• Other useful structures: Interviews, lessons learned or retros, brainstorming sessions, structured walkthroughs, observation.

The test: If your outcomes require active thinking and contribution, you probably need something more intentional than a slide deck and a Q&A.

Design and actively facilitate meeting activities

When you move into working session or workshop territory, you’re no longer just scheduling a meeting. You’re designing the activities that will unlock the outcomes.

Think in terms of activities, not agenda items. Here's a quick reference guide to help you determine the best activity for your goals:

• To understand context: Benchmarking, SWOT, simple models of the current state.

• To make sense of complexity: Estimation exercises, data analysis, problem tracking.

• To move from symptoms to causes: Root cause analysis, "five whys," cause-and-effect mapping.

• To explore and test ideas: Prototyping, scenarios, use cases.

• To surface experiences: Storytelling, experience mapping, journey mapping.

• To organize and decide: Card sorts, clustering, dot voting, simple prioritization matrices.

• To find gaps and failure points: Surveys, "break-the-thing" exercises, risk mapping.

• To support shared memory: Visual note-taking, shared canvases, visible working docs.

Fit structure to purpose, not the other way around

The most important shift is mental: Stop forcing every purpose into the same default meeting shape.

When you apply workshop principles to meetings, you start running deliberate, outcome-focused sessions that respect people’s time and attention. Your calendar still fills up (let's be honest), but now, those blocks of time actually move the work forward.

Related article

• How To Hack Meetings: Using UX and Collaborative Techniques to Make Meetings More Productive